After Wisconsin, Cruz Looks to Churchill and Trump Turns to Troy

Senator Ted Cruz had just won the Wisconsin primary decisively last night, with forty-eight per cent of the vote to Donald Trump's thirty-five per cent and John Kasich's fourteen per cent, and he was searching, in his victory speech, in Milwaukee, for the words that would convey the significance of the moment. He had already talked about how wrong the media had been (although his win had been widely predicted); thanked Governor Scott Walker for his "principled" work on his behalf (Walker's experience in fighting off a recall vote helped); promised to abolish the I.R.S. ("a flat tax!"); and tallied the six delegates that he'd picked up in Colorado earlier in the week, and the two million dollars that his campaign had raised, he said, on Tuesday alone. Now it was time for a little history, and so, after a mention of J.F.K., Cruz drew his eyebrows together and raised one hand slightly, in the manner of Bugs Bunny at the Roman Forum. "As Winston Churchill said on taking office, 'If we open a quarrel between the present and the past, we shall be in danger of losing the future.' The same is true today."

Churchill actually delivered the speech that contained that line (with slight variations in wording) on June 18, 1940, when he'd been in office for a little more than a month. France had just capitulated to the Nazis, and he was speaking about the need for the Cabinet to present a united front, putting aside recriminations about who had or hadn't seen the danger coming, and their personal antipathies. (In the nineteen-thirties, Churchill had been unpopular with many in his own party.) It’s the same speech in which he said that, if Britons stood firm, it would be said of them in a thousand years that “this was their finest hour.” If that's the resonance that Cruz was going for, it was a little large—mortifyingly so—for the moment and for the man. With the delegates he won in Wisconsin, Cruz will likely have five hundred and two delegates to Trump's seven hundred and thirty-nine, accompanied by positions that are, on many points, just as extreme as Trump's. That doesn't even get the G.O.P. off the beach at Dunkirk. It just means that the most likely scenario now for the Republicans is a contested convention in Cleveland this summer.

That makes Donald Trump angry. On Tuesday night, as Wisconsin was being called, his campaign released a complaint in lieu of a concession speech. "Donald J. Trump withstood the onslaught of the establishment yet again," it began, before describing how "Lyin’ Ted Cruz" had colluded with Walker and conservative talk-radio hosts in the service of anti-Trump super PACs. The statement continued, "Ted Cruz is worse than a puppet—he is a Trojan horse, being used by the party bosses attempting to steal the nomination from Mr. Trump." Troy or the Battle of Britain: take your pick. The image of a Trojan Cruz—a big, hollow, wooden candidate-shaped contraption, with a painted-on tie and grin and a trap door in its belly that opens to release a swarm of operatives with iPads—is disturbing, but Trump is not entirely wrong to be wary of delegate-snatchers. Some of Cruz's prominent supporters, like Mitt Romney, speak of Cruz as, essentially, a proxy. He is an unpleasant means of getting them to a convention that will be not owned by Trump—where Trump will, at least, not be in a position to order the walls of Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena painted gold before he arrives. Cruz's victory came after what had been called a bad couple of weeks for Trump, meaning a stretch in which he used Twitter to suggest that Cruz's wife wasn't attractive and went back and forth about whether, if abortion were outlawed, a woman should be punished for having one; apparently, he didn't realize that he was supposed to pretend that stripping women of their reproductive rights was a way to protect women. It also came after Cruz talked about patrolling and securing Muslim neighborhoods.

Cruz, too, implicitly acknowledged the contested-convention scenario: "I am more and more convinced that our campaign is going to earn the twelve hundred and thirty-seven delegates needed to win the Republican nomination”—he was interrupted by applause, and let it continue for a moment before adding the fine print. “Either before Cleveland or at the convention in Cleveland, together, we will win a majority of the delegates.” (Emphasis added.) Cruz must know that winning an outright majority of the delegates is close to impossible for him at this point. He would have to win something like eighty per cent of the delegates in a set of states that includes, notably, New York, on April 19th, a place whose "values" he has said are abhorrent to right-minded Americans. (He is far behind in the polls here.) But getting a majority would also be pretty tricky for Trump. The math gets complicated when one factors in delegates pledged to Marco Rubio, who is out of the race, or to Kasich or—thanks to various state rules—to nobody. At the beginning of the convention, there will be a vote on its rules, and the delegates can vote as they please on them, no matter which candidate they are bound to: one thing they can do is make it easier for an entirely new candidate to enter the race. Cruz has said repeatedly that one of the current rules, 40B, precludes anyone who hasn't won eight primaries or caucuses from being nominated. That isn't true; a candidate just has to demonstrate, up to an hour before being nominated, that he or she has the support of the majority of delegates from eight states. And, after the first ballot, most of them are unbound.

After Wisconsin, a contest, or at least some real drama, is now conceivable at the Democratic National Convention, too. Senator Bernie Sanders won Wisconsin with about fifty-six per cent of the vote, to Hillary Clinton's forty-three, following a string of victories in Western states. For one reason or another, Clinton has simply not been able to persuade Democratic voters that the time has come to rally around her. Sanders announced his victory at a rally in Wyoming, in front of a crowd that cheered as he mused about the word "momentum." Sanders has about two hundred and fifty fewer pledged delegates—the kind you win in primaries and caucuses—than Clinton. He would have a hard time overtaking her, but he does have a shot at preventing her from securing the nomination with pledged delegates alone. That is because there are also more than seven hundred superdelegates who have an automatic vote; most have said that they will support Clinton, but they can change their minds at any time. The Sanders campaign has indicated that that uncertainty might be enough for it to keep pushing until an actual vote is taken at the convention in Philadelphia.

There was some game talk, in the commentary about the primary, about "Wisconsin nice" being a factor in Trump’s repudiation. But Cruz secured his position in part by running ads accusing Kasich of being corrupt (Kasich called him a "smear artist"), and with a barrage of partisan vitriol on talk radio. The establishment, such as it is, seems to have lost interest in Kasich. In Wisconsin, the G.O.P.’s powers may finally have found a way to keep their anti-Trump hopes alive until Cleveland, by furthering the ambitions of a man to whose ideological excesses they are indifferent and whom they do not pretend to personally respect.

In the June, 1940, speech that Cruz quoted, Churchill also looked for a sentiment or two from the past that might direct him. He found it in a line by the poet Andrew Marvell, describing King Charles I in the moments before his head was cut off: “He nothing common did or mean/ Upon that memorable scene.” The Republicans, on their way to seeing their party torn apart in Cleveland, will struggle to say the same. This may be their shabbiest hour.

Amy Davidson Sorkin, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is a regular contributor to Comment for the magazine and writes a Web column in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.